As the July 13 BBC Online news report points out, none of the nine claims regarding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction have been substantiated. You would think that after more than two months of US occupation of the country and the capture of some 35 of the top 55 Iraqis on the most wanted list, that some clear evidence would have emerged by now.
The claims regarding weapons of mass destruction were essentially matters of fact. The intelligence information was supposed to indicate the real existence of the weapons. Along with the statements regarding the weapons, the Bush administration articulated other fuzzier assumptions to set expectations for the American public regarding the impact on the Iraqi people and on the US and for the duration of any war.
Among the ‘fuzzy expectations’ put before the American public were that the Iraqi people would welcome the US soldiers as liberators, that they would embrace American style democracy and that we could quickly set up an Iraqi government favorable to the US. Finally, the establishment of an American style democracy in Iraq would move the entire Middle East in the direction of democratic government. The implication was that we could accomplish this in a matter of months and quickly bring the US troops home.
Iraq is in chaos. We have close to 150,000 troops in the country. American soldiers are attacked regularly and casualties mount daily. The administration says we remain there for "however long it takes". This is defined by current estimates to mean somewhere between four and ten years. In a recent interview the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, indicated that more troops might be sent. The latest estimates for the cost of troops has doubled and obviously could escalate if more troops are deployed. These estimates do not include any cost of reconstruction.
This brings me back to the crusades and Riley-Smith’s short history on two counts. The first is that, without the presence of weapons of mass destruction we are left essentially with a war of liberation. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy that repressed and murdered a lot of people. We got rid of him and liberated the Iraqis.
Riley-Smith in his conclusion says: "For the last thirty years a section of Christian opinion has been advocating the use of force in the case of liberation and has been using in justification of this a theology, including the concept of a political Christ, which is very similar to that which underlay the crusades." (Keep in mind that his book was published in 1987.) While the theology may be similar and probably underlies the current support by the American public, I doubt that soldiers, their families or the American public at large view death in Iraq as a welcome road to personal salvation.
The second count is that the crusades on the whole were failures and they set in motion waves of religious hatred that abide to this day. The first crusade could be considered successful in that it captured Jerusalem. Jerusalem was lost, however, after an occupation of some 88 years and the remainder of the crusades to the east accomplished very little in the end. As the noted historian Barbara Tuchman describes the crusaders in Bible and Sword, "Failure seems to have taught them nothing. Like human lemmings each generation of Crusaders flung themselves into the fatal footsteps of their fathers." To this it should be added that the crusades were extremely costly in treasure as well as in lives. Onerous taxes were often levied to support crusading efforts. Sooner or later the bill will come due for us as well.
On both counts the American public support will wane as the burden grows. Assuming that we can establish an enduring American style democracy in Iraq by force flies in the face of history. We should be asking ourselves if our assumptions are valid and what we can realistically accomplish.
